Review/Photography; Portraits of a People As Seen by Outsiders

By CHARLES HAGEN

Published: January 1, 1993

What's most striking about "400 Years of Native-American Portraits," the richly informative show at the New York Public Library, is the sheer variety of pictures it includes. Many of these are familiar, from the earliest published images of American Indians, by the 16th-century Flemish engraver Johann Theodor de Bry, to the photographs made by Edward S. Curtis in the early years of this century. Taken together, they offer an opportunity to trace how the popular image of Indians has changed over the years.

Artists and photographers have depicted American Indians with attitudes ranging from fascination and admiration to incomprehension. In this they have reflected their audiences. At different times, Indians have been seen as the rightful owners of the American land, actual or potential enemies, or proud and noble tribal people; often they have been regarded as all three at once.

Many of the earlier artists included here tried, with varying degrees of success, to depict the inhabitants of the newly discovered lands in a straightforward and factual manner. But the pictures here, all from the library's own collections, demonstrate how difficult that apparently simple task was, as the artists' preconceptions and assumptions, whether cultural or stylistic, intruded. The Indians in de Bry's images, for example, are rendered in a smooth style familiar from other engravings of the period; they turn and pose like underdressed versions of European gentlemen.

Later, though, the distortions became more overt and willful as artists and their audiences treated Indians as symbolic figures, convenient screens on which to project ideas about exoticism, the wilderness and human nature. Perhaps the most telling example here of this change in attitudes can be found in two pictures of Pocahontas, the daughter of the Indian chief Powhatan. She is credited with saving the life of Capt. John Smith, the leader of the embattled English settlement at Jamestown, Va., in 1607.

In Simon van de Pass's famous engraving of Pocahontas, made in 1627 and apparently authentic in its depiction, she appears in proper Jacobean finery, including a high lace collar and a fashionable hat, that she adopted when she went to England. By 1844, though, she had taken on the attributes of a romantic heroine, and is shown in a lithograph from that year with hair streaming over her shoulders, wearing a flowing gown and clutching a feather.

In the 19th century, artists frequently accompanied exploratory expeditions to the Western United States; their sketches and watercolors provided East Coast audiences with the first visual impressions of the people encountered. At their best, the images made on these trips have a freshness that suggests the sense of discovery the artists must have felt. This is certainly true of George Caitlin's copies of his own pencil drawings made on a journey of this sort in the 1830's, as well as etchings and aquatints by Karl Bodmer, a Swiss artist who traveled to the upper Missouri River in 1833-34.

By the mid-19th century, photographers picked up where these earlier artists had left off. Pictures of Indians became more than ever a staple of both high and popular art. In many such depictions, accuracy was of secondary importance, the primary aim being to fulfill romantic preconceptions about Indian life. Among the examples are tiny tobacco cards of famous Indians chiefs, from around 1900, as well as stereographic views of Paiute women by J. K. Hillers, from 1874, that have since been criticized as fraudulently posed and costumed.

As Indian tribes were increasingly pushed onto reservations, attitudes toward them among the white population changed. Artists began to depict them in almost nostalgic terms, and writers spoke of them as members of a vanishing race. Gertrude Kasebier's portraits of the American Indian performers with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, from 1898, have an almost elegiac somberness.

A similar mood hangs over the work of Curtis, who in the first decades of this century created perhaps the most famous portrayals of Indians. In a mammoth project financed in part by J. P. Morgan, Curtis tried to record the way of life of American Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River. The results were published between 1907 and 1920 as a 20-volume compendium of pictures and texts. Included here are typically heroic portraits from the project, of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, from 1903, and of Geronimo, the Apache leader, as an old man.

The most recent pictures here, portraits of Indians taken by Robert Giard and Toba Tucker in the last two years, demonstrate the obvious: that American Indians have survived, however much their cultures have been transformed by industrial society. But beyond this simple fact, "400 Years of Native-American Portraits" provides ample evidence of how important images of Indians, whether accurate or not, have been to Americans' definitions of themselves and their country.

"400 Years of Native-American Portraits" remains at the New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42d Street, through Jan. 30.

Photo: Chief Joseph, in a photograph by Edward S. Curtis in the New York Public Library's exhibition "400 Years of Native-American Portraits." (The New York Public Library)